The increasing popularity of mobile devices and rapid development of wireless networks result in individuals using their mobile devices to access web services daily. Access to the web services is possible by using a web browser for retrieving and presenting text, images, videos, and other multimedia available on world wide web (WWW). Also, the web browser may be used to access information provided by web servers in private networks or in file systems.
Due to the popularity of the mobile devices, a variety of mobile web browsers is available on mobile devices. Two common mobile browsers that are available are a native browser and a thin-client based browser.
Typically, the native browser directly downloads web pages from the web servers. The native browser then parses and renders the web pages on a mobile device. Due to the limited computing resources on the mobile device, the native browser has limited resources to support complicated HyperText Markup Language (HTML) objects, which require client side computation. As a result, web providers may develop and maintain two different versions of web pages with the same content. The web providers create a version for a desktop browser and simplify another version for a mobile browser with limited computing capability. Thus, a problem is that users of the simplified mobile browser have browsing experiences that are less rewarding or rich than the desktop browser. The problem with using the native browser is the limited capabilities.
The thin-client based browser decouples application logic and a display of a browser. The application logic of the browser includes a HTML parser and a renderer, which are executed on a proxy server. The proxy server retrieves, parses, and renders the web pages to bitmaps, and compresses the bitmaps to send to a client. The client decompresses and displays the bitmaps, along with sending user input to the proxy server. Problems with the thin-client based browser include low-bandwidth and latency issues.